Website Environment Setup

1) Apache, Mysql, PHP

NB: If you want to keep trying new php frameworks and would like to install them with a single click, use Softaculous which comes bundled with ampps.

2) Source code revision control

Download git (you may not want tortoisegit). This is if you want to have your files saved online and keep a history of changes made etc.

To see how this works, you can see my public repos on bitbucket and github.

3) Download your Project

Clone your project from bitbucket.org into a new folder d:\xampp\htdocs\your-website. To do this, you must:
a) create the folder “your-website” in the desired location
b) right click and say git clone (this could be in the tortoisegit menu). Git registers command line context menus without icons, tortoise does it with, so use the tortoisegit ones.

When setting the local folder, make sure the your-website doesn’t get shown twice
https://myuser@bitbucket.org/owner/website-repository.git
i.e. When copying this into the git clone dialog after pasting d:\xampp\htdocs\site, tortoise git will automatically add filename.git, leaving you with d:\xampp\htdocs\site\website-repository in the second textbox.

NB: An alternate to bitbucket is github – repos on github are all opensource and anyone can view them.

4) Run the website locally

Entering http://localhost/site (localhost = htdocs) should show you the website’s home page.

5) Install a code editor – PSPad

From pspad.com, you can install this wonderful text editor and using it, open the ppr file in your project root directory (htdocs\site)

In app/pages, you will find a number of html and php files that are used for the individual pages
template is in app\views\template
css is in assets\css

All these follow very simple html and the main template is abstracted from the individual pages for maintenance.

For more details, follow / ask for wiki articles in your bitbucket repo. or in the Microvic wiki if your website uses that.